E&M vs PPE

Which one do you guys reckon would be the easier subject to get in for?

1. PPE has a higher acceptance rate than E&M (~15% and ~8%?)
2. But PPE seems to have applicants with much higher quality
3. BUT E&M has one of the lowest acceptance rates across all subjects in the university

Do they balance out each other? or not?

What do you guys think?

P.E. nw, i'm not making any subject choices based on replies on this thread

okay i think i ought to dive a little bit more into the matter

no, i'm not choosing subjects based on how easy it is to get a place in it. well not entirely, at least. i had wanted to do an economics degree, came across ppe in the oxford website, thought it was interesting and did some further reading around the subjects and (sort of) fell in love with it. :P however, my school is trying to convince me that i have chosen the entirely wrong subjects for ppe and explained to me that e&m may not be as horrible as it seems. subject-wise i would love to study politics and philosophy but wouldn't mind management as well. so if it seems like i am a significantly stronger applicant for e&m i might consider choosing that. i wouldn't want to give up ppe but being an overseas applicant i always feel like a have some kind of responsibility to my parents who really had to give up loads just for me to be in the uk

hope i had made myself clear and that this is not too much detail! XD anyway thanks guys for your replies

so do the topics of the TSA essay that E&M applicants opt for in comparison to PPE applicants.

In my case, Economics was the primary interest but I also liked politics (still read journals to keep in touch with current affairs, been to tons of MUN conferences etc) but the prospect of studying philosophy for 3 years put me off. Studying logic, reason, ethics, philosophers like Aristotle, Kant etc wasn't something that really appealed to me.

Just fyi, the TSA essay doesn't actually factor in to the TSA score--it's just viewed by the interviewing tutors. So that doesn't add any bias into comparing relative TSA scores--though apart from a very thin correlation with final degree performance TSA doesn't really measure much of value imo.

Also worth noting that what you mentioned about 45 IB points and 4A* applicants being rejected for E&M is not mutually exclusive with DtS's point about a relatively larger number of lower quality applicants.

OP:

I'd say E&M is definitely more competitive, but perhaps not quite at the level the acceptance percentages suggest.

You should definitely go for PPE if you think you'd enjoy it a lot more. You're much more likely to get in if you can demonstrate real interest (and hopefully some further reading).

I'm sorry but I don't buy the whole "lower quality applicants". Oxford shares a huge pool of applicants with LSE, Imperial, UCL, Warwick, Durham etc. Even the worst applicants on an objective basis, are usually predicted 3 As / 38+ IB points.

But it also seems to be a particularly popular with international students who often don't have a realistic idea of what is required of them to make a competitive application, and who sometimes also lack the necessary level of English. And it also seems to attract a surprisingly large number of people who have a slightly misguided idea of the course and (wrongly) believe it's a hands-on entrepreneurial degree, so they spend a great deal of time rattling on about their business experience.
(This is all based on the personal statement drafts I've read via PS-help. They may or may not be a representative sample of the entire pool of applicants, but E&M is definitely a subject which has a higher than average percentage of poor statements as far as PS-help is concerned).